Computer systems having hard copy page printers associated therewith are commonly known, as are the many forms of commercially available RFID memory devices and their associated radio frequency memory device recorders and readers by which the memory devices are either programmed or sensed and read. For example, the RFID technology is well established and may be understood in detail from the published RFID Handbook, Klaus Finkenzeller, 1999, John Wiley & Sons. Some RFID tag creation devices are already commercially available that combine a printer device for merchandise tags and incorporating therein suitable radio frequency memory device programming apparatus so that programmed RFID tags may be conveniently produced on a single machine. The embedding of RFID memory devices in paper media is also already known and has been proposed for numerous applications including tags for currency, important or secured documents, merchandise labels and tags and shipping and handling forms, to name but a few examples.
Using RFID technology, any article including a RFID programmed memory device may be automatically sensed as the article passes by an appropriate RFID reader, thereby making detection and tracking of the article in its movement an easy and convenient task. This enables a host of security and materials handling, control and accounting functions well-known to practitioners in the relevant fields of endeavor.
However, insofar as is known, the currently available technology requires separate means and data streams for creating article tags that bear RFID memory devices, one stream for the visible markings on the tag, and another data stream for controlling the RFID writing or reading apparatus, or the technology requires that either pre-recorded memory chips be applied to article tags printed in a printer, or that the completed printed tags and RFID memory chip assemblies be then passed by an RFID writing device separately to record the desired data in the memory chip. Either alternative is cumbersome and does not provide the flexibility that would be desired in today's mercantile or security applications where a host of different articles may be tracked throughout a site and for which it is necessary to prepare and affix numerous RFID tracking tags, each with possibly unique data recorded in a memory chip. It is inconvenient in the extreme to separately record the identification data in the chips for a plurality of separate articles unless one is tagging a plurality of identical articles with the same information.
One prior art approach to this task has been shown in Published United States Patent Application No. US 2004/0141790 A1 published Jul. 22, 2004 and assigned to the Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. In this application, a combined printer and memory tag application and data memory chip writing device is shown. However, the main processor is required to send separate commands over separate paths to the print head mechanism and to the memory tag dispenser mechanism and to the data writing device in order to print on a paper sheet as required information is printed on its upper surface while at the same time the required memory tags have the necessary data written into them at the data writing device prior to being moved to and applied by a tag application device incorporated with the machine. Such separate control and data stream designs require that the host computer send to the memory tag printing and dispensing and writing device a whole sequence of separate data and control signals to be received by the device's main processor which, in turn, is required to separately control the printer head, the tag dispenser and the RFID writing or reading device. This requires special programming at the host computer and does not lend itself easily to creating paper documents formatted with written material and to locating and appropriately recording into or reading from RFID memory chips that are embedded in the print medium.
As will be readily appreciated by those skilled in the art of modern printing systems, the printing of documents requires a very complex data and control stream from the host computer to carry the pages of data to be printed. For example, as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,407,821 B1, issued Jun. 18, 2002 and commonly-assigned to the assignee of the present application, many modern printers are “intelligent” and are capable of storing commands and data, so that the print description for a page is commonly arranged to minimize the amount of information transferred to the printer over a data transfer path, such as a network. However, as shown therein, generally the print data stream is encoded by means of a page description language which describes the format of each page. Several conventional page description languages are POSTSCRIPT ® which is a print document description language developed by the Adobe Corporation, San Jose, Calif., or ENCAPSULATED POSTSCRIPT (EPS), also developed by the Adobe Corporation. Another formatting language, also developed by the Adobe Corporation is called the Portable Document Format (PDF) language. Still another is the page description language known as MO: DCA™ (Mixed Object Document Content Architecture), developed by the IBM Corporation and set forth in detail in the publication by IBM entitled “Mixed Object Document Content Architecture” Reference number SC31-6802, available from IBM.
These formatting languages each contain numerous repetitively used descriptive and control elements as shown in the aforementioned U.S. Pat. No. 6,407,821 B1 and, as detailed therein, improvements to reduce the repetitive nature of the downloaded information used to drive the printer are a highly-desired achievement. A mechanism for supporting the inclusion of data objects in the host computer output data stream to the printer for controlling and operating RFID writing or reading devices that may be incorporated therewith is most desired. However, within the context of MO:DCA architecture, a number of specified parameters necessary for controlling a printer are mandated for inclusion with each object destined for the printer, and many of these parameters are unsuitable for and are otherwise incompatible with RFID devices. Similarly, if data and control objects for RFID devices were available in the MO:DCA architecture, the included and mandated extraneous parameters required for proper recognition of commands and data at the printer would interfere with proper operation or routing of instructions and data to the RFID devices.
As detailed in the aforementioned, commonly-assigned patent, the IBM MO:DCA file format is designed to be used with a printing system known as the “Advanced Function Presentation” (AFP) printing system developed by, and available from, International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, N.Y. This printing system has an intelligent print server which receives the print data and uses the references in the data stream to retrieve stored resources from a resource database. The resources are then downloaded to the printer ahead of the data. At the printer, the resources are then combined with the print data and sent to the rasterizer for printing. It is in this environment that our invention finds it's greatest utility, provided means and methods can be found for supporting the inclusion of non-print data objects in the data stream from the host computer which are intended for operating and controlling an RFID writing or reading apparatus in association with the printer receiving the data stream without interfering with the printer's tasks of formatting and printing the appropriate pages of information to create a document. Enabling a printer, under the control of a presentation data stream, to write (and/or read) information into (and/or from) a RFID chip embedded within or on a base printing medium is thus an object of the present invention. The base printing medium can be a sheet of paper intended for creating a printed paper document, a merchandise label, shipping container labels, or any other similar article, the presence of which is desired to be detected and traced with RFID technology.